


Sunsets and Sunrises

by emrisemrisemris



Series: On Other Fields [5]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alexios' dysfunctional family, Alexios’ messed-up relationship with Sparta, Dual POV, I hate lockdown, M/M, Missing Scenes, Snapshots, armour is sexy, extra scenes, fighting as flirting, incidentally finishing this has taken me since March, mentions of secondary character death, some D/s, still somewhere in chapter 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26705500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: It was a beautiful summer, bright but not punishing, the kind of weather soldiers prayed for; and Thaletas was spending it in the heart of Lakonia, leagues from the lines, training recruits, reading reports, arguing with the citizens' council and nursing a slowly knitting broken arm. It was a recipe that could have been concocted specifically in Tartarus to drive him mad, and he could not think of a time when he had been happier.Perhaps as a child, when the stories of battle had been glorious and brightly coloured and he hadn't yet understood the grim churn of sweat and blood that powered the mills of war. Not since. And then he'd met Alexios, who fought like a second Achilles and whose pride was of the same prickly, nationless kind as that of the storied hero: more willing to bleed on the word of a friend than budge an inch for the convenience of a kingdom, and intimidated by nothing on earth.
Relationships: Alexios & Myrrine (Assassin's Creed), Alexios/Thaletas (Assassin's Creed)
Series: On Other Fields [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600291
Comments: 5
Kudos: 48





	Sunsets and Sunrises

From nine to twenty-seven the borders of Alexios' world had been narrow: the shores of Kephallonia, and irregular visits to a city here or there when Markos had dredged up the wherewithal for a more-than-usually ambitious harebrained scheme. The neverending standoff between Athens and her allies and Sparta and hers had never touched them: sometimes a port would have red banners one year and blue the next, but the sum total of their interaction with both regimes had been bored guards shaking Markos down for docking fees.

The upending had been sudden and total. First he'd set his sword against Athens, hacking his way nervelessly through Megaris for the chance to come within striking distance of the Wolf -

\- General Nikolaos -

\- his _father,_ whatever clarifications might be necessary when trying to explain the ungodly tangle of it all. His father, who'd taught him to stand firm and strike valiantly and get up again when he fell. His father, who when the Cult had caught him at last in an impossible snare, family on one side and duty on the other like King Kreon in the tragedy, had chosen Sparta.

Every red cloak Alexios had made redder, beginning with Nikolaos', had been a tally-mark against that enormity. Even after the full horror of the Cult had come into proper view he'd spent more time fighting Spartans than Kosmos-worshippers, what with Perikles and Demosthenes eager to have him in the Athenian shield-line and willing to pay steeply for the service. For two years he'd funded his hunt for the Cult off his private vengeance against Sparta: Athenian drachmae patched _Adrestia_ 's sails, plated her keel, paid her crew. In Phokis, Malis, Lokris, Euboea, the crimson banners had gone down before the blue.

When Kyra's message had brought him west from the Pirate Islands to the Silver Isles, he'd had no intention of trusting her Spartan allies. Indeed, before they even landed he'd already been turning over in his mind whether it'd be possible to remove Podarkes without destabilising things so badly Athens lost her grip. 

Three months later he'd helped Sparta take the islands for good. Thaletas had a lot to answer for.

*

The first time Thaletas asked him to come back to Lakonia, it had been standing on the white sand with the moonlight gilding the waves behind them. He'd refused.

Later that night Kyra died, senselessly and unlooked-for, Podarkes' cruelty claiming one last victim. The unexpected news had broken something in Thaletas; he'd shoved Alexios away and gone to try and numb the hurt with wine.

Later still - raw with shock and grief, staring at one another over the wound that had opened up between them - Alexios had laid out what felt like both too many and too few of his own secrets. They'd come to ... some kind of understanding, fragile, but enough to cling to. 

The second time Thaletas asked him had been in the washed-out half-light of the following dawn. _If the search ever brings you to Lakonia - come and find me._

Alexios had sailed on the morning tide with the sunrise behind him. Argolis, Korinth, Attika again, Naxos, Thera: uncounted miles of ocean had slipped beneath the _Adrestia'_ s keel as they went with steady purpose from shore to shore. 

Had it been a year? Surely it could not have been a year. And yet time passed swiftly and strangely when he travelled alone. A misthios - and one as frequently an assassin as a soldier - worked at night as often as he did by day, and so sunsets and sunrises blurred together. Every state of Hellas had its own calendar and cycle of high festivals, none of which were the same as any of the others, and so with every new city the months slipped through his fingers. The turning of the seasons seeped into his awareness only slowly, the realisation of spring or autumn only dawning when it was already painted vividly across the trees. 

A year, then. They'd left Mykonos at the start of summer, after a brutal and bloody spring. It had been the start of another summer, the days unrolling ever longer, when Barnabas had steered them into Gytheion port. A day more to come to Sparta proper - his mother riding into the city as if she owned it - and meet Brasidas, as if by chance, by the temple of laws.

A year.

"One other thing," Alexios said to the spymaster, after his mother had stepped away. "I fought with a Spartan commander last year in the Silver Isles. General Thaletas. Is he in Lakonia?"

Brasidas gave him a thoughtful look, replaced after a moment with a smile. "I think so, yes. He was injured in Messenia; I believe he's still recovering. You're friends?"

"He was the first Spartan who convinced me there might be something in Lakonia worth coming back to," Alexios said, which was the truth. Let Brasidas make of it what he would. They had parted on chilly terms in Korinthia after the fall of the Monger, Brasidas' warmth fading conspicuously after Alexios had ignored his plan in favour of Anthousa's. Alexios shrugged, softening his stance very slightly, and added "I promised to look him up if we were ever in the same province again."

It took Brasidas half a day to find time to check the records and give Alexios a direction - a fort, not a camp; a significant responsibility. More to the point, an easy enough ride. He dug out from his saddlebags the armour that he kept for those times he needed to blend in in Spartan territory, and pulled on the faded red chiton and the heavy warskirt that belted it. Over that went greaves and armguards, the polished bronze corselet, and finally the crimson officer's cloak.

The guest-rooms his mother had demanded - and been given - until such time as the old house could be secured were small but well-appointed, intended for visiting worthies, and this one had among its luxuries a polished metal mirror the size of a serving-platter on the wall. Alexios stepped in front of it more for the novelty than anything else, and caught a glimpse of a man who did not exist.

Somewhere in the tangling paths of history there was an Alexios who had never fallen; who had waved goodbye to his proud mother to follow his father into the army at fifteen, learned his limits in the battle line, and learned the shape of his desires amongst men he'd bled with. He would have met Thaletas not as wary, unchosen allies but as a comrade and an equal. And he would look like this, Spartan scarlet sitting easily on his shoulders, ready to ride to war.

Sick, useless longing twisted under Alexios' ribs.

He turned away, feeling the gaze of the mirror on his back, and brushed out the crest of the polemarch's helmet. He pulled his hair back more tightly to fit underneath, donned it, and went without looking at his reflection again. The bronze and crimson seemed heavier than they had been before.

*

It was a beautiful summer, bright but not punishing, the kind of weather soldiers prayed for; and Thaletas was spending it in the heart of Lakonia, leagues from the lines, training recruits, reading reports, arguing with the citizens' council and nursing a slowly knitting broken arm. It was a recipe that could have been concocted specifically in Tartarus to drive him mad, and he could not think of a time when he had been happier.

Perhaps as a child, when the stories of battle had been glorious and brightly coloured and he hadn't yet understood the grim churn of sweat and blood that powered the mills of war. Not since. And then he'd met Alexios, who fought like a second Achilles and whose pride was of the same prickly, nationless kind as that of the storied hero: more willing to bleed on the word of a friend than budge an inch for the convenience of a kingdom, and intimidated by nothing on earth.

In the palace in Sparta city, those of Lakonia's generals and diplomats who were not on the front line met to piece together the thousand fragmentary reports into something resembling a picture of the whole. With grudging permission from his physician to ride - as long as he was escorted - Thaletas now travelled to the capital frequently to be part of the strategic effort, and so for once they had intersected not at the fort but in the agora: Thaletas between meetings, Alexios between his own mysterious errands.

They shared the midday meal, and afterward moved through the crowded streets without any particular destination, savouring one another's company. Alexios was back in the battered light armour Thaletas always thought of him in: plain, hard used, such as might be worn by any warrior of no particular station anywhere in Hellas. He did not look like a man who had been instrumental in the toppling of a dozen minor tyrants and was here in Sparta to try and kill a king.

They could hardly discuss that now, not in the heart of the city. The krypteia notoriously had ears everywhere, alert to the whispers of rebellion.

"You must have seen most of the city by now," Thaletas said, 

Alexios tilted his head, disagreeing. "I've spent most of my time elsewhere."

"I'll show you the sights."

"I'd like to see the temple of Aphrodite," Alexios volunteered unexpectedly, and followed it even more unexpectedly with "I owe Her an offering."

Alexios talked about the gods almost never, and veered between angry and troubled when he did. All across Hellas, as he told it, he'd found corrupt priests, more interested in the power promised them by the Ghost of Kosmos than in divine service; false prophecies; embezzled offerings; temples made fronts for the machinations of the Cult. Everywhere, the supposed will of the gods turned out more often than not to have been concocted by the hands of men. 

And yet in the same breath he'd talk - obliquely, awkwardly - of things beyond the work of mortal ingenuity, halfway beyond even mortal comprehension, and fall silent. 

Thaletas had encountered only the smallest fragment of the other realm that Alexios had one foot in, when he'd touched the broken spear and briefly been surrounded by the past. He would forget it had happened, and then - at moments like this - remember, and feel the world stumble a little in its traces.

Sparta, though, he understood.

"The Temple of Aphrodite?" Thaletas echoed. "Come. It's this way."

Sparta city in the summer was as joyously resplendent as the armies she sent to battle, crimson banners fluttering from balconies and columns and everywhere the gleam of bronze. The market-stalls bustled, loaded down with fruit here, cloth there, polished jewellery on another again; the air was thick with the smell of spices around the stall Alexios stopped at for temple-flowers. Birds chuntered on rooftops, and Thaletas glanced up reflexively at that thought to look for the ever-present eagle.

"He'll be hunting in the fields," Alexios said, following his gaze. "He knows I'm in good hands."

Thaletas laughed at that, and led Alexios through the teeming streets to the temple of Aphrodite. Her sanctuary was not so large as that of Zeus, or Dionysos - and none of them as imposing as the high temple of Athena that overlooked the city - but it had its own presence: the cool shadows were heavy with incense and fragrance, and the image of the goddess looked down from above the altar with piercing intensity. 

The temple was not crowded: the other worshippers could be counted on one hand, and beyond them there were only the dedicates of the goddess - one tending the altar and the sacred flame, and one priestess just beginning to recite aloud. It was not loud, but she had the trained expansiveness of an actor, filling the lamplit space with rich echoes. The hymn told the tale of how Zeus, resentful that He too was subject to Aphrodite's power in matters of love, caused her to lose Her heart to the Trojan Anchises, a mortal man.

_Muse, tell the deeds of golden Aphrodite,  
_ _who rouses passion in the gods themselves:  
_ _before Her kneel the nations of the world,  
_ _birds of the air alike subdued to Her,  
_ _and all the creatures that call land their home,  
_ _and all the creatures that indwell the sea ..._

Thaletas did not go up to the altar, but stayed where he was, arrested by the cadences of the poetry, and only when Alexios looked at him questioningly remembered himself enough to say "This is the temple of Aphrodite Areia."

Aphrodite the Warrior; Aphrodite Who Is Like Ares, armoured and armed. Sculpted curls tumbled out from underneath the high-plumed bronze helmet the statue wore, and in Her right hand, wrist heavy with bracelets, She held a spear. Aphrodite saw through the messy depths of the human heart as if they were clear water, and even though he was in the presence only of Her altar Thaletas felt exposed.

Alexios gazed up at the statue, and after a long rapt moment said, only half joking, "In Sparta, even Aphrodite is a warrior?"

Every time they spoke, it seemed, there was some new reminder that Alexios knew the country of his birth barely at all; more often than not it made Thaletas grind his teeth over the years that could have been, but today the quiet gaze of Aphrodite stilled him. Who was he, to stand in Her temple indebted to Her for a blessing already outrageous and undeserved, and have his first thought be that he wished She would have granted more?

So he did not say any of the things he might have said in a hotter moment, and instead said simply “Ares Himself yielded to Aphrodite. And She has brought down more kings than He has, too.”

*

Since landing in Megaris for the first time, Alexios had never spent more than a few months in the same place at a time, and often less; and every time he thought he'd uncovered an answer to one of the Cult's mysteries, it burgeoned like the hydra's neck into further questions. The mundane inevitabilities that had pressed suffocation-close on Kephallonia now seemed as unattainable as the moon. Never mind stable politics or simple loyalties; he would have settled for reassurance that the laws of the universe would be the same tomorrow as they were today, that legends remained legends and the dead, dead.

Now, though, he slept and woke with Thaletas within arm's reach. Not every night, not even most nights, if he stopped to total up those spent on the road in Lakonia or Arkadia; but when he lay down alone in the guest-house in Sparta city, or curled in a bedroll under the stars, he did so in the certainty that they would come back to one another. 

Warmth kindled in his chest each time he turned at the crossroads down the rutted track towards the fort and its by-now-familiar routines. Thaletas would greet him with gossip about backbiting in the citizens' assembly - plus biting commentary - or news from commanders he knew fighting Athens elsewhere; Alexios would trade for his own latest news. 

He had not known, before, how much he had needed this: somebody to return to who knew his secrets but was not entangled by them; who wanted him for reasons unrelated to his blood or destiny; who was proof that the world kept turning when he was gone. 

*

It was another afternoon in the city, the sun blazing in a cloudless sky, when they turned out of the long avenue of pillars at the Persian Stoa and almost walked into a middle-aged matron in a red chiton. Alexios stopped as if he'd been poleaxed; Thaletas was a couple of steps ahead before he realised, and turned back.

"Chaire!" she was saying warmly, and a moment later gathered Alexios into an embrace, brief but clearly heartfelt. "When did you come back to the city?"

"Less than two hours ago," Alexios said. "I came straight here to meet the general." A fractional hesitation, and then "Mater, this is Thaletas. We fought together in the Silver Isles. General Thaletas -" his title sounded strange in Alexios' mouth, almost to the point of sarcasm "- this is my mother, Myrrine."

She offered a polite hand; Thaletas took and shook it, and said with one eye on Alexios "He talks about you often."

He shouldn't have been scrutinising Alexios' mother, of all people, as a potential threat. Alexios would have laughed at the idea. But it paid to have the measure of one's allies as well as enemies, and somewhere in the back of his mind the rusty instinct that said _do not underestimate_ had waved a flag. He found himself studying the woman in front of him with as much sudden attention as he'd ever paid to an evasive spy or enemy commander.

Alexios was thirty. His mother couldn't be much over fifty: he recalled that she was the daughter of Leonidas' age, only a little girl when he'd left for Thermopylai to die. She had glossy hair the colour of iron and deepening laughter lines around her eyes and mouth, and as she sized him up in turn Thaletas thought he caught a glimpse of what Alexios would look like in twenty years - greyer, worn around the edges, but still viciously sharp.

He had an uncomfortable feeling she could see right through him. 

"Only the good parts, I hope," Myrrine said, and there was an unmistakable warning under the lightness. 

"You can trust him," Alexios said, with the same edge.

Myrrine gave Alexios a long look at that, but after a few seconds broke into a smile. A politician's smile, deliberate as a statue's. What had she spent those years of exile _doing_? Where would a nobly-born woman with Alexios' apparently bottomless reserves of stubbornness wash up? 

"Good," she said after slightly too long a gap. "We need all the allies we can get."

"Exactly," Alexios said cheerfully. "We work well together."

"I'm sure you do," Myrrine said, laughing. She folded her arms in exactly the same way her son did, and Thaletas noticed she had the silver tracks of old scars over her fingers - like Alexios, like he himself had: the unmistakable stamp of time in the melee. "I'm sure your business is important; I'll leave you to it. Come by the guest-house when you're done."

She nodded to Thaletas and went past him into the crowd, 

"Your mother terrifies me," Thaletas said frankly, some time later, when they were alone again. "Where _was_ she for those twenty years?"

"She spent time in Korinth, she was a pirate for a while," Alexios said, shrugging - as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say; Thaletas nearly spat out his wine - "and then she ended up as governor of Naxos. I'm still not quite sure how."

*

Summer was on the wane when Nikomedes, the fort's long-suffering physician, checked Thaletas' left arm over and pronounced that the risk of some other minor injury setting back the healing was largely passed, and he could start training in seriousness again. 

Late in that evening, when the night watch had gone to their posts and the fort was quieting, Alexios was seeing to his horse when Thaletas came to lean on one of the hitching-posts, arms folded, and said with a smile playing around his lips "The practice ring is free."

Alexios raised his eyebrows, finished what he was doing, and came away, dusting off his hands. The interior of the makeshift ring laid out with supply crates and weapons racks was worn down to bare dust, a little yellow grass clinging on here and there, and scuffed with footprints and dents where the recruits had been training. 

Thaletas poked through the row of wooden practice swords, selected one, and made a few tentative passes with it, saying "I'll know I'm healthy enough to go back to the front when I can make you sweat again." 

"By that measure you've been well enough for weeks," Alexios said, laughing, and took a sword of his own. 

They squared off, and Alexios let Thaletas set the pace, watching his opponent's form rather than seriously pressing the attack. Thaletas' skill had been close to his own once; now, for all the injury had healed clean, the months of enforced inactivity had cost him. His sense of how to move with his opponent, and where to place each stroke and parry and counter-stroke, were still as good as Alexios remembered, propelled by training so deeply embedded it was almost instinct. His balance was off, though, after spending so long with his left arm immobilised, and that coloured everything else, throwing his aim out of true, making his thrusts less forceful than they had been, and leaving his guard riddled with holes.

After a little while, Thaletas held up a hand for a break, and Alexios stepped back. 

Hands braced on his knees, gulping down air, Thaletas looked up at him accusingly and said "You're going easy on me."

"Of course I am." Alexios gestured with the wooden sword. "Do you _want_ to break your arm again?"

"I can get an easy fight from any man in the fort," Thaletas snapped. "At least let me lose to you properly."

"Your wish is my command," Alexios said dryly, and took a moment to stretch while Thaletas collected himself. When Thaletas picked the sword back up and resumed his guard, he wore an expression that dared Alexios to be over-lenient again. 

He didn't wait for a signal but went straight back on the attack, still shaky but furiously determined. Alexios stepped up his responses; still favouring the defensive, but matching his speed and movement to the very limit of Thaletas' rusty skill, and perhaps a little beyond it. There was no use in forcing Thaletas to lean over-hard on his shaky strength or balance - which could likely only be repaired with time and conditioning - and so he concentrated instead on testing the parts that seemed to have survived better: moving the combat, deliberately leaving openings to test whether Thaletas saw and took them.

The sky darkened slowly around them, the last of the sunset dying fully away until even the courtyard beyond its circle of torches was largely indistinct. Flickering firelight, darting shadows, the smell of sweat, Thaletas breathing hard: echoes of their very first meeting, the slaughter on the beach - but other memories as well, now, of the by-now-familiar walls of the general's quarters and the play of the lamplight over the shield that hung on the wall.

After a while longer of back-and-forth, punctuated by cursing, Thaletas dropped the wooden sword back into its rack, threw one exhausted arm around Alexios' waist and said "I yield. Come to bed."

There was a scattering of applause from the handful of men who'd paused in their duties to watch the General fight. Thaletas grinned, tired but warm, and accepted hand-clasps and encouragements from a couple of them.

"Your men are happy for you," Alexios said as they left the group behind.

"My men," Thaletas said wryly as they went up the creaking wooden stairs, "have had to put up with me out of my mind with boredom for months. They'd cheer for Artaxerxes of Persia if he was keeping me occupied."

His room was cramped, for a man to sleep and work in, but far better than the narrow bedrolls or hammocks of the soldiers, and it had the indefinable feel of being lived-in. The faint scents of ink and lamp-oil and herbs would probably never wholly leave the air, even once Thaletas moved on to his next command; the wall would always have a ring on it where his shield had hung, as the wood around it discoloured slowly in the sun. 

Thaletas lit the lamp, closed the door and window-shutters, and turned, evidently satisfied, to survey his domain. His measuring, proprietary gaze took in the heavy pay and records-chests, the stacked tablets and ink-pots on the desk, his armour on its stand, the neatly arranged bed, and finally Alexios. 

"Everything to your satisfaction?" Alexios enquired dryly.

"There's always something wrong with this place," Thaletas said with a roll of the eyes. Alexios had never previously appreciated how much work was needed every day just to keep a permanent encampment functioning, but it ate up an infuriating amount of Thaletas' time and attention. "The tree by the west wall needs to come down. The roof leaks, the stairs are unstable. Why are you still dressed?"

"That at least is something I can fix," Alexios said wryly, and began shucking off the armour. Thaletas liked the idea of watching him strip, but in practice rarely had the patience, especially as the need to stay carefully clear of the injury had lessened. It didn't take long, and he stretched gratefully when the cuirass was off; things clicked in his shoulders. 

Thaletas had no armour to take off, though he'd doubtless be back in it tomorrow, and so had nothing to do but undo his belt and the pins of his chiton and lay the cloth aside. Alexios' breath caught in his throat. 

The Spartan was not precisely good-looking, not as a sculptor or a painter would have judged it - neither tall nor broad, but compact, softened a little now by a season without training; a face with his temper written in it a little too visibly, maybe - but self-assurance radiated off him like heat from a summer sand-dune, and in much the same way made everything around him blur into the background. 

Alexios stepped into his arms, and kissed him, marvelling over it again. A few tangled moments later, neither quite willing to let go, they made it onto the bed. Thaletas pushed Alexios down onto his back, grinding his weight along the length of Alexios' body with an intensity that felt like it was striking sparks, and said hoarsely "Do you _know_ how long I've been waiting to hold you down again?"

"You might have mentioned it once or twice," Alexios told him, unable to keep back a grin, and got a chuckle in return.

"Arms," Thaletas said, and Alexios lifted them over his head, settling his hands behind the pillow to rest against the wooden wall.

That was part of it too: not just the physical force of Thaletas' body pinioning his, but the blunt orders instructing this or forbidding the other, given with the commander's certainty that they'd be obeyed. 

Alexios closed his eyes as Thaletas lowered his head for another kiss, and let the tension in his shoulders ebb. Every time, he had to take a moment to sink into it again; to let himself be restrained, to put aside the instinctive urge to answer strength with strength and instead enjoy the rare relief of yielding. Every time, it felt like a long exhale after a held breath, or the sudden lifting of a weight so familiar he no longer noticed it.

And if the dizzy solace of submission hadn't been enough by itself, there was the effect it had on Thaletas. To be wanted so much, so hotly, was itself intoxicating. 

He felt Thaletas run the back of one hand down his cheek, and then turn his palm to slide his fingers into Alexios' hair, cupping the back of his head. Thaletas loved his hair; he'd never commented on it, but it was obvious enough from how the Spartan's hands always seemed to end up tangled in his braids and holding tight. He'd have to comb them out and redo them in the morning, and pick stray beads out of the bedclothes when Thaletas inevitably ended up scraping them loose, but _in the morning_ was a very, very long way away -

Thaletas' other hand slid down his chest and stomach to stroke his cock, first lightly, then forcefully, and then gathered both their shafts into his fist and stroked them together. 

Eyes closed, head thrown back against Thaletas' grip, the constellation of isolated small sensations seemed unbearably intense. There was the sound of Thaletas' breathing and the little frictions of skin on skin, and the sheer warmth of him; now the release as Thaletas left hold of him, heat lingering on the skin where his fingers had been; Thaletas nudging his knees apart with surprising gentleness, oil, Thaletas' fingers again; and at last the blunt, hot pressure of Thaletas' cock, driving urgently into him.

He breathed through it, willing away the instinct to brace or tense again, and let Thaletas take him. There might have been nothing else in the world beyond the two of them and the shift of the bed underneath him and the wall behind. 

It felt as if he saw climax coming from a very long way away, like a wave that built and crested in the distance before it flooded up along the shore. It broke over him in a long slow rush, and Thaletas' cock was still hard inside him when he came in spurts in the general's hand.

Thaletas made a half-heard sound in the back of his throat that had no words in, and leaned forward over him, bracing against the bed as he thrust; in the hazy aftermath of climax his every movement was suddenly brightly intense to the point of pain. 

Alexios was past obeying orders, and pulled Thaletas into his arms. He came hard a few moments later, gasping against Alexios' collarbone, and settled into stillness, his breathing receding from ragged to even.

He withdrew himself after a moment, hauled himself clear of Alexios' legs, and rolled flat on his back with audible relief. Alexios reached down wordlessly and took his hand.

They lay together in silence for what might have been a few minutes; impossible to say, with no means of keeping time beyond his own heartbeat, and that still shuddering down from its peak. The air around them seemed drained, sound muted, as if he was drifting up only slowly from a deep dive and content to let the water bear him up. 

It could not last, and didn't. Thaletas got up, cursing light-heartedly at the stiffness in his knees, and went to wash in the ewer in the corner. Alexios turned onto his side to watch him, appreciating the play of his shoulder muscles under the skin even in so small a movement. 

He took his turn to clean himself up while Thaletas retrieved breechclout and chiton and found the wine-jug, and accepted the cup the general offered a moment later. It was good wine, even by the standards of what the officers drank, and he lifted the half-drained cup quizzically. "What's the occasion?"

Thaletas checked in the middle of pouring his own cup, and took more care than he needed to in setting the jug down again. When he looked up, he was smiling, but there was no humour in it. "I put it aside when I came to this posting, ready to celebrate the day I'd be well enough to leave it again." He raised the cup in a mock toast, irony tinging his voice. "I should have learned on Mykonos not to pray for things to end."

*

Thaletas wrote formally to the capital, informing the assembly of lawmakers that he had the use of his arm again, and would be able to command an army, if not fight in the battle-line for a little while yet. He wrote with an unpleasant weight in the pit of his stomach, already resenting the inevitable summons that would take him away from Alexios; but he had his duty just as Alexios had his own strange quest to follow, and both of them had known that from the start.

The reply was swift; it must have been written almost as soon as his message was received, and given to the next courier travelling out of the city. It was signed from Brasidas, writing for the Two Kings, and briefly laid out that he would have a new commission - mentioned, elliptically, a new push northeast - but not yet. 

_Hurry up and wait_ was the nature of war. He could hate it all he wanted, but moving men and materiel around a dozen, more, shifting fronts spread around all the states and islands of Hellas took time and planning, and was liable to stall on the smallest obstacle. So it went.

And it was, however shamefully, harder to chafe at the delay when it gave him longer with Alexios, who now had a small mountain of evidence of the Cultist King's machinations and yet still - this branch of the Cult, it seemed, properly cautious of their secrets - no name.

*

High in the scrubby forest overlooking the Valley of the Two Kings, Alexios woke up with the dawn, when the first sliver of the sun-disc breached the sea horizon with a glow like burning copper, and found Thaletas all but in his arms.

Yesterday had been the hike up from the fort, twenty miles along the coast and up into the hills: not an overlong or over-difficult march, but not an easy one either, and the recruits had been feeling it by the time they stopped to make camp. Thaletas had put himself in charge of the latest set of manoeuvres for the younger men not because it was a job that demanded the attention of a fort commander, let alone a general, but rather because after months of light duty he claimed to need the practice himself. Alexios had attached himself to the expedition without asking as such, and none of the unit had passed comment. Gods only knew what gossip they would be repeating elsewhere, but Thaletas had waved away Alexios' misgivings. He trusted his men, and so far as he was concerned that was the end of it.

Thaletas stirred in his arms, still mostly asleep, and Alexios absently reached to stroke his hair.

Three years he'd spent fighting the Cult. He'd given little thought to how many more might lie ahead: what was the point in that, when he already knew that he would not, could not, lay the quest aside? _Afterward_ was a word to glance at only sideways: look at it straight on, and it would fade into mist, like Eurydice on the threshold of the underworld.

He wasn't sure when exactly the little treacherous hope had crept into his daydreams, that there might be something in that aftermath worth waiting for, beyond the battle finally being over.

Thaletas had never voiced it, not with the scar of the first time of asking still there, but it was in his voice when he talked about the winter festivals or the way the stream below his sister's homestead ran high in the spring rains. He wanted Alexios to stay, and everything in Alexios' body flinched from the idea of living here with the shadow of the mountain always in the corner of his eye. 

On this hill, though, the tent-flaps faced the sea, and outside them the overnight camp still slept. The only men up were the recruits who had drawn the last watch, one eyeing the road, one tending the low fire, and neither had noticed that anyone else had woken. The thin column of smoke hung almost unmoving, the air still; nothing disturbed the depth of silence except distant birds.

He lay with Thaletas curled against him while the light flooded the landscape, gold on the wavetops of the slate-dark sea like old, blackened armour with its gilded fittings still polished bright, and resolved that today he would not think of ancient evils nor new perils. It was autumn now, Thaletas moving easily again, and surely it could not be long before one or both of them was called away.

*

Alexios ate the midday meal with his mother one day as water sheeted down outside the shuttered windows of the guest-house. A storm had blown in off the sea, sweeping up over beach and field, and been turned back by the mountains to sit over Sparta city and rain.

If it hadn't been for the rain, he might have left after they'd eaten the last of the honey-cakes, but Myrrine peered around the door, shook her head, and said "Your poor horse won't thank you for riding in this. Stay a little."

She fetched out more wine, and stood at the small table by the window to mix it up with water. She still had her back to him when she asked "I meant to ask. How's your general?"

" _My_ general?" Alexios echoed, laughing.

Myrrine turned back with a drinking-cup in either hand, a gust sending water clattering off the shutters behind her, and said with half a smile "Am I wrong?"

She had always been able to read him like a book. An absurd warm glow filled Alexios' chest briefly - Thaletas, his; still new and wondrous put like that - but faded almost immediately, disquiet uncoiling in its place. Alexios took the cup she held out to him, suddenly apprehensive, and said "He's well. Waiting for a new commission now his arm is healed."

The moment stretched out slightly too long, before Myrrine sighed, put the cup down and said "Lamb, does he know that you've put a target on his back?"

"He knows," Alexios said, and remembered Thaletas' feral grin. He'd tried to frame it as a warning; the general had taken it as a challenge, and his refusal to be daunted by the Cult's air of doom had made Alexios' heart sing and sink at the same time. "I couldn't say whether he understands, completely. But he knows."

The rain pattered down outside, the smell of it seeping into the room through the cracks of the doors and shutters. Smoke from the brazier, and rain, and wine. Myrrine sat down, leaning back against the wall with evident relief, and Alexios found himself noticing for the first time details that sheer familiarity usually obscured. That the gloss of her hair was slate grey now, not the blue-black he remembered; how deeply carved the lines of her face were, and the little stiffnesses in the movement when she arranged her skirts or laid her hands on the tabletop. 

She sounded suddenly older, the words brittle as ice on deep water, as she shook her head and said "I was married to Nikolaos for eleven years, and I don't think he completely understood the battle he had joined until it was too late."

"That doesn't say much for his skill as a general," Alexios said bitterly.

"Alexios," Myrrine said, reproving, and he fell silent at the crack in the ice.

He couldn't have said exactly how long they sat at the table together letting the rain fill the empty spaces. The same half-dozen thoughts about Sparta and duty and justice wound around and around in his head, going nowhere, and all tangled around the question that Myrrine had not asked him - had never asked him - about the death of Nikolaos; it occurred to him only now that it was because she must already have known the answer, and there was nothing to be gained by either of them saying it out loud. 

*

"Tell me about the Cult's soldiers," Thaletas said one day, as the two of them sat on spread-out cloaks on a low rise set back from the road. He had been called into the capital yet again, for a meeting of several generals with the Two Kings; then, inevitably, other urgent business had arisen that demanded the kings' time, and so an unlooked-for sliver of his own had opened up. He'd used it to take Alexios out of the city to where the yellow flowers spilled down the slopes of the hills, just as they did below his sister's homestead, and spend a golden hour or three all over one another like a pair of wayward new recruits.

Afterward they'd washed off in the stream, sat to dry out, and then - unwilling to return to life's mundanities just yet - stayed, to watch the sky and bask in the guilty warmth of stolen time. Alexios was only half dressed, his chiton undone at the shoulder and falling open to the waist.

They'd talked of nothing - it made him giddy, the luxury to have the _time_ to talk of nothing - and then wandered back again, like a ship failing to steer around a whirlpool, to the Cult of Kosmos.

Alexios had mentioned in passing the footsoldiers of the Cult, who guarded its temples and safe-houses. Thaletas had found himself wondering who they were, and how the Cult managed to stay so secret while maintaining, as it seemed, its own armed guard.

"Thugs," Alexios said. "Fanatics. Not frothing at the mouth like Ares berserkers, but they don't stop when they should. Well equipped, well trained, but nothing you couldn't deal with. The one you need to be afraid of -" he shook his head "- is Deimos."

"Like the son of Ares?" Thaletas queried.

"The Cult's champion." A cloud passed over Alexios' face, and he looked away, staring up at the sky. "That ... would be my sister. Yes, she survived too. We're hard to kill."

Thaletas had known what was coming, somehow, from the moment he saw Alexios' face change. He put both hands to his face, drew them down, and said "Every new thing I hear about your family is worse than the last."

"The last time I saw her was in Athens," Alexios said, as if he hadn't heard. He was still staring upward. "The plague had taken half the city. They were burning bodies in the streets. You could almost touch the smell. Pericles was holding things together, just. And then she killed him, and it all came to pieces." 

It must have been nigh impossible to reach Perikles in the very heart of Athens, behind those impenetrable walls that had held off Sparta's armies for so long, and behind the phalanx of hard-faced guards that every archon trailed in his wake.

Alexios could have done it, of course. 

A half-dozen fragments of reports from the Attikan front slotted together into a whole that was not pleasant, but made more sense. There were a dozen more questions he immediately wanted to ask; and at that he had to take a moment to groan inwardly at himself, ears pricking up at the smell of strategy when he had a man like Alexios half-naked at arm's length. In the end the only one he actually voiced was "Where is she now?"

"I don't know. My guess would be north, killing for Kleon." Alexios looked back at him for the first time in long minutes, half smiling, but the edge of it tinged with regret. "Maybe I should have followed her. But here I am."

"And when you've dealt with the Cultist King you can face Deimos with Sparta at your back," Thaletas said, and reached to put an arm around Alexios' shoulders. "If the Cult will play on the stage of kingdoms, they can learn to face armies. Force them into the light, and crush them."

Alexios looked at him for a long moment, as if weighing up whether to argue, and then only laughed and covered Thaletas' hand with his own.

*

Sailing to Lakonia from Naxos, bringing _Adrestia_ carefully through the late-spring squalls, it had seemed to Alexios that Taygetos had lurked on the western horizon for days. Sometimes it was no more than a shadow among the shadows of dusk, sometimes wholly shrouded in the fog that sometimes came down over the sea in the small hours of the morning; but then the sky would clear and it would come shouldering out through the clouds like one of the colossal statues of the gods, a great stark stele of a peak that said: here stands Sparta.

In the weeks and months he'd spent in the Peloponnese, in Lakonia and Arkadia, it had gnawed at him, the angular shape ever-present when he looked towards the sunset, familiar like an old wound. And so one day when the wind had an edge in it, he stocked up his saddlebags with supplies and went south and a little west toward where the highest peak rose above Bryseae. He rode up into the grey foothills, cropped-back fields dotted with granaries to either side of the road; soon field gave way to forest, the trees heavy with leaves already turning bronze. He slept at the last village - barely worth the name, a cluster of goatherders' huts clinging to the slope - before the road ran out; in the morning, he left the horse there and went on on foot. A walk became a hike became a climb, up the sun-warm stone hand over hand, until his shoulders burned and his fingers cramped. The rock grew slicker, colder, and eventually he hauled himself over the lip of the cliff and found himself in snow.

He kept going, the cold biting at his legs and fingers as he hunted for handholds, until the steep slope softened into a snowfield that was almost flat, and he climbed to his feet. Ikaros settled on his arm as if the eagle had been waiting for him.

Alexios stood on the spine of Taygetos, and looked down.

To the west, Messenia fell away towards the ocean, the lowering sun lighting up the distant horizon; south, there was the sea and the distant sails of ships; east, the lights of Sparta. Northward, there was the gap of the pass like a missing tooth, and beyond it - drawing his eye with leaden inevitability - the half-visible promontory with its broken pillars, and below it the long shadow of the cliff.

He'd half-expected - hoped for - something, some katharsis, and that hope only came fully into focus now, as he realised dully that it had gone unanswered.

There was, would be, no freedom in putting Lakonia to his back. The land of his birth had a hold on him again: not a tie of blood or inheritance or homesickness or loyalty - things he had not chosen or did not feel - but the recognition that he was not going to abandon Thaletas and Thaletas was never going to abandon Sparta, and it did not take a philosopher to finish the equation. He wanted to laugh. 

It was not so long until nightfall, and he had a journey to make. Best not to be caught in the snow overnight, when the sun went down and all the warmth drained out of the earth at once. There were limits to his endurance, though he was no longer entirely sure of where they lay.

Alexios shook Ikaros off his arm into the sky again, and started the long climb down to Sparta with the eagle wheeling overhead.

*

Alexios came to the fort at the golden hour, afternoon on the verge of turning into evening, one day as autumn was beginning to think of turning into winter. The wind had an edge on it now, and the apple trees were laden. All across Lakonia, citizen and helot busied themselves with the last of the harvest.

There had been no more word from Brasidas about the commission Thaletas was due to take on, nor anything conclusive out of the citizens' assembly; the landscape of the campaign shifted constantly, there were any number of places where an additional force might be sent or redirected, and gossip had it that the Two Kings were at loggerheads over some or other detail of strategy again. Thaletas cherished every extra day, storing them up like the harvest against the winter that was surely coming.

So when Alexios closed the door of Thaletas' room behind him, pulled off the helmet, and said, without preamble, "I have to go north," he was braced for it.

"Have to?" Thaletas set down his stylus and stood up, stretching. Praise be to Asklepios, it was good to stretch again. "Who's paying?"

"The kings have work for me." Alexios' contemptuous tone made it more than clear what he thought of this. "The price of Spartan citizenship and the - _forgetting_ of my previous crimes." He grimaced. "My mother's, too."

"Your _mother_ 's crimes?" Thaletas said, momentarily distracted. "What, the piracy?"

Alexios shrugged. "Interfering with the oracle, by saving my sister. And King Archidamos ... also objected to her leaving Sparta. She broke his nose."

"Of course she did," Thaletas said, and boggled only briefly at the image. "What does he want you to do?"

"They have a task each. I am one-sixth of Herakles," Alexios said, bone dry. "Pausanias wants Sparta to win an Olympic wreath at next year's Games. Archidamos wants victory in Boeotia."

The sheer incomprehensibility of the first task - in what? Personally? How? - was immediately eclipsed when he mentioned the second. Thaletas stared at Alexios and echoed, incredulously, _"Boeotia?"_

Alexios nodded.

"Four generals have taken and lost it. Including your father." He saw Alexios' eyes flick back sharply to him at that. He sat on the edge of the desk and drummed his fingers, remembering the acres of forest riddled with hidden pits. "It's miserable in the winter. Caves and swamp, swamp and caves. You'll come home with mushrooms in your hair."

"You've been there," Alexios diagnosed.

"My first deployment," Thaletas said sourly. "I hated it."

"What's miserable ground for an army can be easier for one man," Alexios said tentatively.

"Perhaps. I wouldn't care to face Boeotia's champions without an army at my back. Or you." Thaletas looked up, meeting Alexios' eyes. The mercenary had no smile, for once. "Even you, though - to send one man to tip the balance in Boeotia? Someone is trying to have you killed."

"What else is new?" Alexios rolled his eyes, and hooked a stool out from the corner by the records chest to sit down. "All right. Tell me what I'm going to be dealing with."

Thaletas pulled over the tablet he'd been taking notes on and smeared the wax flat again with the back of the stylus, his half-drafted report receding into unimportance. He sketched in the rough shape of the middle of Hellas, with the long gash of the gulf of Korinth cutting it almost in half, and marked the borders of Boeotia; within them, a notch for Mount Helikon, another for Parnassus, a squashed circle for wide Lake Kopais. He reached up absently to open the shutter further for a little more light, and took a moment to enjoy the way the rich light fell across Alexios' cheekbones and jaw as he studied the makeshift map.

Helmet on his lap, cloak still on, he might have been any commander Thaletas had ever briefed to lead a mission. Perhaps, one day, when he'd finally put down the - quest - destiny - that so plainly weighed on him so hard -

Thaletas put the thought firmly to one side. _One day_ was neither here nor there when he had a campaign to strategise for _now._

He turned back to the map. It had been years since he'd spent time in Boeotia, but he never forgot a battlefield, and the sheer discomfort of the winter camp had lodged deep in his recollection; he could almost feel the heavy damp of the forests again. "From Lakonia, you'd go overland across the Isthmus of Korinth. From the last reports I had, the Athenian garrison are at the old Fort of Plataia - here - and our beachhead is _here_..."

*

It was a straight enough road to Boeotia, from Sparta city up through the valley to the border with Arkadia, and then through Korinthia and Megaris again to join the road to Thebes. All of it was territory he'd passed through before: he'd been on the road so long now that he was crossing his own tracks, going back over old battlefields with newly narrowed eyes. 

Arkadia was Spartan-held, and his royal warrant would see him easily past patrols and border encampments. Korinthia and Megaris, though, were held by allies of Athens, and he could not risk the warrant and seal falling into Athenian hands. There was also the matter of the trail of blood he'd left behind him in Megaris, before he'd first given his sword to Athens. Three and more years ago, now, but people who'd faced such things had long memories, and the Cult were unlikely to leave alone such a potent source of fuel for rumour and discontent.

Thaletas had not asked, and he hadn't volunteered, how long he might be gone. Alexios had practically seen the abacus clicking in the general's head as he did the same calculations Alexios had when the Two Kings had first handed down their decree. Months in Boeotia, and then travel to the Games - with a long detour to pick up this champion from his training island - the length of the festival itself, and then, unless the army had finished the job in his absence, back to Boeotia again. Something ached in his stomach at the thought, of putting another year between them; worse than the first time, too, because now he knew for certain how much it was going to hurt.

Why had they not sent Thaletas to Boeotia as well? He was fit again, he was a ruthless strategist who understood the kind of hole-and-corner war that the Boeotians had mired the Spartan forces in, he knew the territory, and Sparta did not have so many skilled generals that there would be a crowd of candidates left, if four seasoned commanders had already tried and failed. Not Brasidas, who was serving as spymaster, and not Lysander, who was back in the capital. He ran idly through the half-remembered names of other generals he'd encountered in this island or that, sure he must be forgetting some, and then fell back, like a man picking at a half-healed wound, to Thaletas' offhand comment that one of the commanders who had not won Boeotia had been the Wolf.

He'd thought Archidamos' choice to send him to Boeotia was merely - if that was the right word - a cynic's bet, guaranteed to either secure a difficult front or remove a potential usurper and strengthen the Kings' hand either way. It took on an uglier cast now. He half wanted to stop at the next outpost and get them to send a courier back to the capital, with the message that if Archidamos wanted to know how Alexios measured against his father, there was a lake he could dredge in Megaris.

If there _was_ more to it, though, he might find the trail of the Cultist King in Boeotia. He'd known for some time the Cult had a hand there, with some lever against the leader of the province, and it would be precisely in their nature to co-ordinate between both sides of what was ostensibly a bitter conflict in order to make sure one inconvenient man ended up dead. But that co-ordination was built on an intricate web of letters and records, so many that there were always a few not destroyed when they should have been, and it would only take one.

The resentment that had simmered in his chest since the Two Kings dispensed their commands began to subside. It made all the difference to have something to be going towards - even if it was only a hope, a possibility, of answers - and not to ride through the familiar slopes of the valley where he'd come with Thaletas' recruits and dwell only on what he was leaving behind.

*

In Lakonia, a week after Alexios had kissed him goodbye and taken the road north - alone, lightly provisioned, grinning, like the madman he was - Thaletas was summoned into the capital again to receive his orders.

The garrison in Sparta city was bustling, messengers and soldiers going this way and that, and he waited in an antechamber while a servant went to alert the administering officer that he was there. He took advantage of the time alone to stretch, letting some of the knots of the ride out of his shoulders and hips. He felt unbalanced still, the strength in his left arm less than what it should have been, but it was already better than it had been two weeks ago, and the rest was just a matter of time and training.

The man with his commission proved to be Brasidas. Of course it was. One of the Two Kings' most trusted right hands, a seasoned field commander, and a canny diplomat, which was just another way of saying _spy._ He had a trestle table set up in front of a shelf sagging with tablets and haphazardly-piled scrolls. They exchanged salutes; Brasidas poured him wine and waved him toward the fruit bowl set under the window.

Thaletas accepted the courtesies, and waited.

"I have your commission, General," Brasidas said, when they'd dealt with the pleasantries.

"I've heard word of a new offensive in Boeotia," Thaletas said, carefully neutral.

"From Alexios, of course. Yes." Brasidas shook his head in apology. "The kings argued for some time over who should command it -" he turned to sort through his shelf of papers, saying over his shoulder "- and Archidamos did favour someone seasoned in the field. But Pausanias was inclined to let a newer general try, since so many others have failed, and in the end the assembly sided with him. Anyway -"

Thaletas - a general himself less than two years, and off the front line for four months of that - filed the oblique compliment away, and said simply "Where to?"

"Arkadia, to meet Menelaos on the border there. Then Korinthia." Brasidas turned back, and handed over a tightly rolled scroll, the lambda stamped deeply into the heavy seal. "The Athenian grip on it is still uncertain, and the immediate unrest has died back. The hetairai - "

He kept talking; Thaletas did not hear more than odd words, his attention wholly on the new commission. He broke the seal on the writ, unrolled it, and scanned through the few neat lines without seeing them.

Arkadia, then Korinthia. Not a lightning conquest, then, but the grinding business of holding borders and cementing occupations. Brasidas himself had commanded the Spartan force in Korinth up until the previous year, pick-pick-picking at the knot of politics and money and violence that held the Monger and his mob in power, and had perhaps even been getting somewhere when Alexios had turned up and cut through it.

At the bottom of the scroll, the insignia of Archidamos on this side, Pausanias on that, and today's date: _ordered on this day ..._

He rolled it back up, and then stopped, some twinge of instinct prompting him to read it again.

The ink had dried properly into the papyrus, brown rather than true black. Except for the date, which was fresh and dark, and with a little scratch where the ink had smeared.

"This is weeks old," Thaletas whispered, lowering the scroll. "You kept me here. You kept me in Lakonia while Alexios was here."

"What point are you making, general?" Brasidas said tightly.

Thaletas threw down the scroll, and followed it up with slamming both hands on the edge of the table. Scrolls and brushes jumped and rolled. "I could have gone north two weeks ago. I could have relieved Menelaos already and started for Korinthia -"

Brasidas leaned on his own side of the table, until they were no more than a few inches apart, and countered "And the judgement of the Two Kings was that you would do the best service to Sparta staying where you were."

"Why?" Thaletas demanded.

"Because, general," Brasidas said, scrupulously civil, "the Eagle Bearer isn't loyal to any banner. You told me so yourself." The spymaster's face was set, unreadable. "But it does appear he's loyal to his friends."

Thaletas looked him in the eye and said levelly "We're fucking, Brasidas. You don't need to pretend you didn't know."

"His lover, then. And a handful of comrades, and his mother. Those are his only levers." Brasidas straightened, clasping his hands behind his back; Thaletas took a small, vicious pleasure in the spymaster's visible effort to hold onto his temper as he went on "So; we fight our battles with the weapons we have, not the ones we might have wanted."

"Battles? Alexios is on our side!"

"I wish I could be as sure," Brasidas said, sounding genuinely regretful, and saluted with cool, rigid, formality. "May Athena guide you in Arkadia, general. Travel safe."

Thaletas returned the salute, picked the commission stonily off the table, and went, back straight, before he gave into the urge to argue and said something to Brasidas that he would regret. Even with the wait, the whole acrimonious exchange had taken no more than half an hour, leaving him suddenly with time to kill: he had anticipated being kept at the garrison longer, and Kittos and Aniketos, who had escorted him, would not be back from their own errands for some time.

There was the Temple of Athena, its pointed gable taking a neat bite from the blue sky, and Thaletas thought briefly of going to pay his respects. In Korinth, though, the highest temple was raised to Aphrodite. If Sparta wanted to retake the city, it would not happen without the favour of its patroness.

Thaletas threaded his way through the market-day streets, thinking to stop at one of the stalls for flowers, and passed under the portico into the cool dark into the temple of Aphrodite Areia with his hands full of fresh-cut blooms. Scented smoke with the sweet edge of ripe fruit lay thickly in the air, and one of the priestesses was singing.

He remembered, suddenly, taking Alexios to the shrine early in the summer. The mercenary had not recognised Her at first, Aphrodite Who Is Like Ares, worshipped as She was by that title only in Sparta. The priestesses had been chanting the same hymn then, the ancient poem telling the tale of Aphrodite and Anchises.

Thaletas laid the flowers at the altar, amongst dozens of other offerings. Loose petals covered the flagstones. He'd left a trail of flowers for Alexios on Delos, a ridiculous, adolescent gesture straight out of a cut-price poem; still he could not say quite why he had done it, except that such things made sense around Alexios.

Alexios would be in Boeotia by now: armies moved more slowly, but a lone rider able to dodge Athenian patrols could cover the ground from Sparta to Thebes in six or seven days. He would have met this fresh general, whoever it was - and there could only be so many candidates there, unless the man was truly newly promoted - and already be testing the ground. That would be a long campaign, and the Olympics would not even start for another two seasons. In the matter of his own commission, Arkadia was faltering without Lagos at its head, Korinth still in turmoil. Impossible to judge how long it would be before either of them could breathe again, or before they could spend a night under the same roof; impossible, and yet he was already counting the days.

Thaletas knelt before the altar of Aphrodite Areia and resolved privately that he would lay flowers at every one of Her shrines from Sparta to Korinth if She wanted them. Let them only lead Alexios home again; back from the political snakepit of Olympia, back from Boeotia's hungry swamps, free of whatever snares the Cult had waiting along the way.

He had known on Mykonos, he supposed, that he'd given his heart away without wholly meaning to. It had taken longer, and the piecing-together of a great many grim fragments gleaned from Brasidas and then - eventually, when demanded - from Alexios himself, to understand what that meant. To choose Alexios was to choose a side in a battle that had been going on without him for generations, and would continue for generations more, and of which the nuances and complexities were as far beyond him as the intrigues of the gods had been remote to the common soldiers dying at the walls of Troy. It was the vertigo of the open ocean, where to revel in the wind and the spray and the power of the ship cutting through the waves depended on choosing to forget how below the sturdy keel there was a stadion or more of hungry water, and beneath that only the shipwreck-ridden rocks.

The priestess reciting the hymn had reached the part when, with the morning, Aphrodite revealed herself. Thaletas listened to her chant, and closed his eyes as the high space echoed with the terror of Anchises, who was not the first mortal nor the last to lose his heart to an Olympian encountered unawares.

_"The moment I first looked upon your face,  
_ _I thought you were divine, but you denied it,  
_ _you were not honest with me then - but now -  
_ _now, in the name of Zeus who bears the aegis,  
_ _I beg you on my knees you will not curse me  
_ _to go back and live bereft with mortal men  
_ _but pity me: for I have heard it often  
_ _that no man keeps the whole of what he was,  
_ _who has lain down with an undying god ..."_

**Author's Note:**

> The quoted material is my own (very loose) verse translation of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, ll.1-5 and ll.185-190, relying very heavily on the (much more accurate) versions at the [Perseus Digital Library](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D5) edited/translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, and [this version](https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/aphrodite.html) translated by Gregory Nagy.


End file.
